Moving time – please update your bookmarks!

I’ve decided to move this blog over onto my own domain name instead of keeping it here on WordPress.com. The reason being that I’ll better be able to follow visitor statistics – not because I’m a prime example of streamlining my site to suit different user populations, but because I’m curious. Currently I can’t see how people find my blog – and I’d really really like to know how people in countries all over the world happen to come upon my stuff! So to satisfy my curiosity I’m moving.

Therefore, please update your bookmarks – this blog will now be found at http://alexen.dk/blog

Hope to see you there!

The joys of transcription

Oh yes, it’s that time again. First time I did it in the park under a tree. Second time I did it on a yacht in between some Croatian islands in the hot hours of the afternoon. This year, I’m stuck in my office (and thus have access to the web) and am therefore sharing a couple of my favourite tools for transcription. (Yes, i really mean it, the interviews for last year’s M.Sc dissertation were indeed transcribed on a yacht. It was quite nice actually, especially because I was limited to however long the battery would last on my laptop, which was about 1.5 to 2 hours, and then had to wait for next time we were in harbour and I could charge it up – thus giving a semblance of productivity while reducing the guilt factor.)

Surprisingly few people I’ve talked to are aware of the tools that are freely available to reduce the pain of transcription – as much as you can possibly reduce such a thing. There are two tools that I currently use – for different purposes. I have no foot pedal or other specialised equipment – if you do, this may not be relevant to your needs.

The first tool I use is Transcriber, which is good for well.. your bread-and-butter getting from sound to text. It’s open source, so free to use, and has several useful features. Firstly it gives you a visual representation of the sound file along which your pointer moves, so that you can actually see when someone starts talking. That’s very useful for orienting yourself on a micro level and helps you to chunk up the recording more precisely. The chunking up is a second useful feature. Each time you press Enter, Transcriber inserts a break point in the transcript – and you can move between the break points by using arrow keys. I use break points for every turn in the interview, so that I can quickly jump between questions and answers for example. The programme also allows you to create any number of speakers and to assign a speaker to each turn as you go along – very useful when you’ve got 3 kids talking all at the same time (in case you actually manage to distinguish what any of them are saying). Finally, Transcriber allows you to alt+arrow a second or so in each direction of your current position – useful for hearing that elusive word again and again.

I am aware that there are loads of similar products out there to be had, but I’ve tried quite a few of them and never found one just as easy to use and having the features that I want (obviously this is a matter of preference, I’m just stating mine). There are certain draw backs to Transcriber – such as having to export and tidy up your trancsript when you’ve got to the (sweet) end of the recording. Since you’re typing in to Transcriber and not into your word editor of choice, you’ll need to export the transcript to HTML, copy and paste it over, and then spend some time formatting. Another quirk I’ve found is that when I convert my WMA files to MP3 (since Transcriber is somewhat limited on formats) i need to convert it in mono, or it’s going to sound scratchy in Transcriber. But I’d say it’s worth it – once you’ve got it set up, it does save you an awful lot of time – and it’s free.

The second tool that I’m currently using is a Mac-only tool called Global Transcribe which aids transcription of both audio and video by letting you play back your media in VLC player and use a global shortcut to stop and start your file from anywhere. It lacks all the visual tricks and segmenting that I like in Transcriber, so I don’t use it for primary transcription. I have, on the other hand, got a job where we’ve outsourced the transcription. Here I need to listen through the interviews and read through the transcription to pick up on any mistakes the transcriber may have made (where it was impossible for her to pick up technical vocab for example, but which makes instant sense to me). That’s where Global Transcribe comes in handy – I open the transcription up in Word and the sound file in VLC and then occasionally stop it (while being tabbed into Word, thus the global shortcut thing) to correct an error. Very efficient and a great time saver – and again: for free.

The same company do other free transcription tools, both for Mac and Windows, but I haven’t found them as useful as Transcriber – try them out, see what you think. I hope this has been helpful fome someone out there!

Twitter in 1935??

I seem to have developed some sort of gleeful antipathy to Twitter. A sort of ‘love to hate’ relationship. Well here’s the latest spoils of StumbleUpon. It brought up this little blog post on a 1935 version of a messaging system. It’s a sort of vending machine-looking piece of communication apparatus to be put up on street corners or popular meeting places. The ‘meeter’ can scribble a message on a band of paper, pop in a coin, and the message will then be prominently displayed in the machine’s window for the ‘meetee’ to find. I.e. “Sorry matey, you were 10 minutes late and I have more important things to do than stand around in the rain waitning for you.” Matey then turns up, to find that he’s missed you by exactly 2 and a half minutes.

Yes, granted, it makes even less sense than Twitter, since you can be pretty sure that the right person is definitely not going to see your message (at least until the point where these messaging machines become so well integrated into the meeting-culture that you would actually expect people to look at them). But still, a wry smile of satisfaction from me over yet another piece of Twitter mockery.

Working by the bell

After a long time without posting, I’m back. I apologise for the long break. I’ve just not had the inspiration to put my thoughts down – admittedly there have been few worthy thoughts lately.

But here’s a nice little parody on teacher life, which although it is hilariously exaggerated, rings some bells (sorry for the bad pun – you’ll see when you watch the video) with what I’ve seen of teacher life so far. Teachers seem to be ruled by the bell. They live by it’s merciless calling and have to drop whatever they are doing when it bids them to. In some schools bells even sound more like alarms than the good old school bell, and make you want to grab your nearest and dearest (computer) and run for your life.

Although the bell can sometimes be a welcome sound to us – both teachers and students – in many circumstances the teacher has to fight against it’s shrill power: raising his voice to be heard while struggling to get students to sit still for an extra minute, rushing through the assignment of homework, hastily thanking the students for their work in the lesson. Then the students are released and joyfully (or less so) skip towards next heavily regulated slice of time. The teacher also has to slip in to the next ‘box’ hastily erasing from his mind what just happened in the former lesson and prepare for what awaits in the next. Are teachers really a kind of computers that can perform equally well no matter how many times a day they have to ‘reboot’? I don’t think so. This instant save-and-load mode of school is not conductive to reflection in teachers OR students! So what do the good teachers do? They run faster. Not an enviable position to be in from where I sit!

And here’s the bit of entertainent that sparked this thought.

What a lovely view!

Yes, it’s official, I’m addicted to StatCounter. Even more than I’m addicted to Facebook.

StatCounter is a tool that lets you folow the traffic on your blog and tells you where in the world people have viewed it. Now, I’m aware of the power of information visualization and all that, but it is a completely different feeling when you are visualizing your own data, your own little creation of no particular importance to the world in general, but important enough for these people to have a look and a read. Thus, my very favourite function on StatCounter: the map. And here’s the current map that makes me so happy – there’s something magical about knowing that someone in Iran or in Peru has looked at what you’ve written.

A desktop-sharing tool that works for desktop-sharing

I have been looking for an online conferencing tool for some time. In my collaboration with Ed Podesta, we’ve often resorted to Skype for meetings – because I’m in Oxford and Ed’s in Reading, and besides I’ve got to attent to my pint-drinking needs. What I’ve been lacking in these conversations, was the ability to do a bit of hand-waving and show what I was talking about. Out work involving concept mapping, I was missing drawing a map of what was supposed to happen in the next lesson, so that we could align our ideas.

I finally found a free online (browser-based) conferencing tool called Vyew, which had a desktop sharing capability that actually worked on my Mac. After celebrating this rare occurence with a little dance of victory, I waited for our next Skype meeting to try it out. It turned out to more or less work – i.e. I could more or less fluently show Ed what was going on on my desktop, so that he could see how I was changing a concept map we were preparing for the lesson. According to me it does help to work on a communal artefact like that in a meeting – especially when you can’t really see each other (or at least not see much of each other above and beyond a murky picture).

What I really like about Vyew is firstly that it is browser based (i.e. no installation), that it is free and that there is no need to set up complicated accounts for all the participants. Even the meeting host needs not have an account – you can just go to the site and start your hand-waving. The directions to the meeting are propagated via email in the shape of a link directly to the meeting room. Very easy indeed.

That said, I never managed to make the voice and webcam functions work. I didn’t devote much time to making them work, on the other hand – after all, Skype would be running anyway. So all in all: a very useful tool to have in the kit!

Technology de-tech’ed

I stumbled upon a site with some wonderful little movies today. These are meticulously constructed stop-motion (my best guess!) animations reinterpreting cooking, computer games and even war using everyday objects.They are well worth a watch! I’m especially fond of the pizza-pac-man eating a t-shirt-ghost with fried-egg-eyes.

But have a look at some of the other short films and loops as well – they are very entertaining indeed.

http://www.eatpes.com/game_over.html

Ultimate motivation

I’d never heard of ‘contact juggling’ (long live Stumbleupon!), but then  I saw this little video and was rather in awe of this guy’s skills. Contact juggling is about cheating our brains and creating illusions of movement that is not actually there, of rotation and of weightlessness – at least that’s what I got out of it. What I find really interesting is how some people go to great lengths to become good at something that may some time turn out to have some financial value, but is mostly… just very very cool. What this guy is doing must have taken years and years of practice, of standing in front of a mirror and practicing the weightless look, smoothing out his moves and adding to his growing arsenal of tricks. It’s not a cool thing to do like being good at football – it is not a widely known ability, which is accepted by most people. It’s possibly built up in a group with other similarly mided people, and used to impres friends, but does the credit measure up to the effort and the extreme patience put into perfecting this art? What’s really interesting is what motivates some people to go to extreme lengths in becoming really really good at something rather obscure. I bet there’s a social element to it – like with the group of guys jumping around on their BMX bikes on Wellington Square – they do it in a group and look cool together. Is there anything we can learn from what makes some really strange things (like contact juggling) seem cool, that will enable us to make other things (like solving quadratic equations for example) look cool too, so that (more) kids will have a compulsion to spend time on becoming really really skilled in something weird, like French grammar or the Periodic Table?

Here’s the video; enjoy the magic of the weightless crystal ball!

Many questions – few answers

I attended an ESRC seminar today, which is part of a series about the educational and social impact of new technologies on young people in Britain. Quite a few questions emerged in my head while listening and I’d like to throw them out to everyone to comment upon. I would really appreciate your ideas, because whereas I have many questions, I have very few answers. A colleague at the department told me that that’s what it’s like being in academia, but I would still like to (naively?) believe that we’re here to find some answers as well as posing new questions.

The most important questions for me came out of Steve Moss‘ talk about the Building Schools for the Future project. The BSF project is a 45 billion pounds (!! – yes, 9 zeros) government investment to rebuild secondary schools both in terms of bricks and mortar, but also in terms of ICT. Steve was talking about how physical as well as virtual spaces can create new opportunities for learning, and illustrated it with examples of both physical transformations of school space enabling a flexible learning layout and virtual spaces which enabled and facilitated a deep dialogue between students and tutors outside school hours.

He went on to say that the VLEs or ‘virtual learning environments’ we most often see today, are nothing of the sort, but are in fact ‘virtual teaching environments’ geared towards efficiently getting content out to learners and getting their responses back. Although the distinction between a VLE and a ‘VTE’ is not really well formulated in my head just yet, I agree with this point, and it very much echoes my experience in one of the schools participating in my doctoral study. Technology is often thought about in terms of making existing practices more efficient and very much of streamlining administrative tasks. Pedagogy in this case falls behind, and although I’m all for making necessary but time consuming tasks more effective, this can hardly be termed ‘technology for learning’. But if we in fact build real virtual learning environments, that are to be used for learning and not just teaching, which transcend traditional boundaries of school, such as disciplines and departments, will the teachers necessarily take naturally to them? I have great doubts about this. I think major institutional changes are needed in order to refocus attention on learning and away from teaching and administration. What will it require to induce this change of focus? That’s one question without an answer – but following are some related questions that may have part of the answer hidden in them.

Both virtual and physical spaces are being re-thought and re-designed in the BSF project. A great problem is to rethink spaces in light of existing theories of learning and pedagogy, so that we don’t just reproduce the spaces we have today in a new colour, and don’t end up with some of the properties of today’s school which we would rather avoid. It is proving problematic in the project to engage designers, school leaders and educational researchers in the new designs within the time frame of the individual school projects. But what interests me even more is the inbuilt (although not unquestioned) assumption that the new spaces will be able to transform pedagogy. Steve was talking about the importance of school strategies and pedagogical views on the formulation of the design. But how far will even a good design be able to push the boundaries of existing pedagogies, as long as the assessment structures currently shaping English education, are in place? Will the new spaces be able to induce more creativity within the ‘box’ of the assessment scheme and perhaps reduce the exam to ’something at the end’ rather than being ’something we spend the year preparing for’? Will the spaces – both physical and virtual – even allow schools to transcend the ‘assessment box’? And what if they do?

What I was really missing was a discussion about how assessment and curriculum policies should be harmonised with initiatives like the BSF project in order to provide an actual move towards creativity, inclusivity and flexibility, that such a rearrangement of spaces could enable. I may sound pessimistic in posing this question, but will changing the layout of our learning spaces really enable us to innovate pedagogically, or will we be constricted by the assessment culture that is currently a dominant influence on pedagogy?

And finally we will need to think about how we will prepare our learners – and not just our teachers – for taking more responsibility for their learning. Learner agency, it seems to me, is something to be practised from an early age, and even then, will we end up enabling some learners and not others by making learning more flexible and in that sense ‘threatening’? But that must be a question for another post, since this one is getting way too long.

A piece of beautiful and eerie film design

This has nothing to do with anything – I just think it’s cool.

Procrastination sometimes brings up something interesting. Today’s quirky find is this little movie which is very atmospheric and incredibly well made. It’s definitely worth a peek.